Nicholas Carr: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

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“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,” Nicholas Carr wrote in 2008, “remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

Carr’s cover story for The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” helped crystallize a sense of unease that had just started to dampen widespread enthusiasm for online life and its possibilities. New means of communication and knowledge transmission—the printing press, radio, television, now the internet—have always been met with fears about what may be lost with their adoption. Although these concerns can be overblown, they are not unfounded. Because communication technologies mediate our understanding of other humans and the outside world, changes in those technologies really do affect the way we think—sometimes profoundly.

Carr’s cover story was the first in a long line of explorations in The Atlantic about the unintended consequences of online life on our minds and behaviors. (Our February cover story, “The Anti-Social Century,” by Derek Thompson, is one of the latest installments.) Recently, I spoke with Carr about his essay, and about how the digital world continues to change the way we read, think, and remember.

This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

The Honeymoon Is Over

Don Peck: In 2008, before iPhones were widely used, before social media was ubiquitous, you made the argument that the internet was changing our brains, chipping away at our ability to think deeply. The tech environment then was in many ways very different from the one we live in today. How has that argument aged?

Nicholas Carr: When I wrote the article, I saw it as a personal essay built on my own sense that I was losing my ability to concentrate because I was spending so much time online. And I knew I was being speculative.

Unfortunately, I think my speculations have been proved correct. Look at how technology has changed since 2008: As you said, the iPhone had just come out. Social media was mainly used by kids. The kind of distractions and interruptions that I described—which back in 2008 kind of only happened when you were sitting in front of your laptop or desktop—now happen all the time. So I think that, if anything, disruptions to our train of thought and our ability to put information into context and to interpret things deeply—it’s now much worse than it was 17 years ago.

Peck: What have you done in your own life, since then, to resist the problems of scatter and superficiality? And has any of it worked?

Carr: I wish I could say I’ve solved the problem. When I wrote the article, we were still in a honeymoon phase with the internet, and most people assumed that by getting greater access to information, you’d make people smarter. But I think we all struggle today, because society has reshaped itself around the assumption that everybody is online all the time. It’s very hard to break free of that.

Social media is particularly good at distracting us, so I try to keep my presence there to a minimum. I try not to keep my phone on my person all the time: If I’m going out for a walk or going out to dinner, I’ll try to leave it behind. If your phone’s always with you, it grabs a permanent hold on your attention—even if you’re not looking at it, you’re thinking of looking at it because you know something new is always there.

But I don’t want to present myself as some model of a person who’s solved this problem. And I have to say, I think the struggle is getting harder rather than easier, even though we kind of see the problem more clearly now.

Peck: You have a new book out, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. It follows, to some extent, from some of the inquiries you began all those years ago. What’s the main message of the book?

Carr: So, ever since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, we’ve taken an idealistic view of communication. We believe that if communication among people is generally good, then more communication is going to be better. It’s going to bring more understanding and ultimately more social harmony.

In the book, I argue that that assumption is catastrophically wrong. When you speed up the exchange of messages and information beyond a certain point, you actually overwhelm the mind’s ability to make sense of it all in a deep way. To keep up with the flow, people have to sacrifice emotional and intellectual depth. We become reactive and impulsive, and that ends up triggering misunderstanding and animosity and, in general, misanthropy.

The book looks at how the internet affects our social lives—the way we converse, the way we develop relationships, the way we socialize in general—from a perspective that is kind of similar to the way that my 2008 cover story looked at our intellectual lives. In both, what I’m arguing is that there’s a fundamental conflict between how the technology works and how our minds work. And it’s a conflict that I’m not sure can be remedied.

Peck: Some of the changes involve not just the way we read or receive information, but also the way we write and post. Can you talk about how that affects our thinking as well?

Carr: In the 1980s and early 1990s, as email was becoming popular, I think most people initially saw it as a substitute for the postal system. And people wrote long, careful emails, in a very similar form to what they would have written in a personal letter. But as the intensity of email picked up, they became shorter, sloppier, and more superficial. And yet they displaced letters—very few people write personal letters anymore.

The flow of messages through social media and texting intensified all that, and telegraphic exchanges have become the default language we use today. In one sense, you can understand that. We’ve adopted this new way of speaking to one another because it’s the only way to stay afloat in the flood of messages we have to deal with. But self-creation comes through language, through expressing yourself. By constantly compressing the way we speak, we’ve lost a lot of nuance, and I think we’ve also compressed ourselves in a way. And we’ve let this all happen with very little resistance.